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WARREN -- Stephen Greenspan, Ph.D., a professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut appeared in Judge W. Wyatt McKay's court Thursday morning as an expert on intellectual disability in an evidential hearing in the case of Andre Williams, who is convicted in the 1988 beating death of a man and blinding of a woman.
Williams, 55, was sentenced to death in 1989 for the attack that left George Melnick, 65, of Warren, dead and the beating, blinding and attempted rape of Melnick's wife, Katherine.
Williams lost a series of appeals, beginning in the 1990s, to get him off death row. In 2016, he was grated a disability hearing, known in the courts as an Atkins hearing. In the 2002 case of Atkins v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to execute someone who is intellectually disabled.
After hearings peppered over several years, McKay in April 2019 upheld the death penalty decision against Williams-- but in January of 2021 the 11th District Court of Appeals reversed the decision and the case was returned to McKay's court for further proceedings.
Thursday, defense attorney Allen Rothman called Greenspan as a "teaching witness" to give expert testimony on intellectual disability.
Greenspan said intellectual disability is characterized by three factors -- "significant deficits" in intellectual functioning, typically determined by a gold-standard IQ test, adaptive behavior, and that the former manifest within a developmental period, typically defined as between birth and age 22.
During the previous hearings before Judge McKay, testimony centered around the fact Williams had scored 75 on an IQ test, putting him in the "borderline range of intelligence."
Greenspan said Thursday that 100 is used as a normal IQ, with a standard deviation of 15 points. Two standard deviations under, or an IQ of 70, is considered intellectually disabled, though two leading sources on the subject, the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities manual, use an IQ of 75 to designate disability.
The expert added it's a mistake to think testing the same individual on IQ will always result in the same score.
Every human is different and they test higher or lower on different sections of the test, he said.
Greenspan said that in the cases of intellectual disability, the brain never fully develops, typically leaving people with a "mental age" of 12 or younger. He also said intellectual disability is a lifelong condition -- not an exclusive diagnosis -- and often coincides with mental illnesses.
Greenspan at one point in his testimony mentioned Williams specifically, and McKay reminded him that as a teaching witness, it was not his job to get directly involved in the case. After some back and forth, Rothman said he would keep his questions theoretical for the remainder of the testimony.
Greenspan also appeared as a witness at the earlier hearing. A state motion to exclude earlier testimony of Greenspan was granted in November of 2016, according to court records.
Williams, who is incarcerated on death row of Chillicothe Correctional Institution, did not attend Thursday's hearing.